The purpose of this question was to determine whether the students without any prompting recalled general strategues (heuristics) that were useful in solving mathematical problems. Only half of the students were able to give concrete answers and usually the student could only think of a few such approaches. In some instances the responses were not heuristics at all. Among the responses were the following:

"We were taught to try to make the problem simpler, for example through a different way of representing it. The 'balls and walls' was an example."

"Make charts and diagrams, get a representation, explore the necessary (mathematical) resources needed for the problem."

"Learned more about this in this class than in all the others. Need to sit with a problem and understand it. Break it into smaller cases and put them together to do the bigger problem. Search for a pattern."

"Learned how to approach a problem better. Look at what is given and what is to be proved."

"Use alternative representations to get a different way of looking at the problem."